Subject: bug#65348: INITIAL-INPUT in completing-read repeats same entry twice consecutively

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2023 09:32:46 +0300

> Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2023 05:56:04 +0000
> From: Heime <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked]
> 
> > The manual tells you what to do instead.
> 
> This used to be easy for beginners.  Now it has became complicated.

Using completing-read was never easy.

> Had hoped the plan for the future was to improve things for
> beginners, now everything has started to get modified for use mostly
> by experts.

The Emacs development enhances the existing functionality, and that
inevitably makes some situations more complex to handle.  That is the
price for added functionality, and no one has yet found a way of
making software more flexible and powerful without also making it more
complex.

> > > > Why do you need INITIAL?
> > > 
> > > I want the user to see a default without having him to get it with the bloody "M-n".
> > 
> > 
> > That's not how you show the default to the user. The way to show the
> > default to the user is to include it in the prompt, like so:
> > 
> > Type your choice (default foo):
> 
> I do not want the user to type it, but for it to be displayed automatically.
> And if theyy do not want the default, they can step to the next possibility
> in COLLECTION.

Then you will have to override the value of
minibuffer-default-add-function with a function of your own.